Bob Woodward Throws an Interception

By now, we all know, or should know, the strengths and weaknesses of Bob Woodward. As an old-fashioned beat reporter and player of the Washington access game, he has few, if any, equals. Woodward’s beat is the capital’s establishment. Ever since he and Carl Bernstein shot to fame with their Watergate reporting, he’s been trooping in and out of the offices of senior officials, writing down (and presumably taping) what they say, and using his notes as the basis for journalistic narratives that are, by turns, revelatory, informative, incomplete, infuriating, and downright misleading. But whatever you think of Woodward’s methods, his outpourings can rarely be ignored. That’s what makes him Woodward.

In 1988, he published “Veil: The Secret Wars of the C.I.A., 1981-1987,” which contained his famous account of a deathbed conversation with William Casey, the former C.I.A. director. Casey, according to Woodward’s telling, admitted that he knew about the illegal diversion of monies from Iranian arms sales to the Nicaraguan Contras. “His head jerked up hard,” Woodward wrote. “He stared, and finally nodded yes.” “Why?” Woodward asked. Casey whispered, “I believed.” Did it happen like that? Even today, it’s a matter of dispute. In 2010, a former C.I.A. employee, who was part of Casey’s security detail, claimed Woodward “fabricated” the story after being turned away from Casey’s room at Georgetown University Hospital. Woodward dismissed the agent’s statement, saying agency guards were not present around the clock. Whatever the truth of this particular detail, there is no doubt that Woodward had a great deal of access to Casey. According to C.I.A. records, the director spoke with Woodward forty-three times while he was working on the book. Whether or not Casey coughed up the deathbed admission, “Veil” contains a wealth of previously undisclosed details about C.I.A. operations.

The real rap on Woodward isn’t that he makes things up. It’s that he takes what powerful people tell him at face value; that his accounts are shaped by who coöperates with him and who doesn’t; and that they lack context, critical awareness, and, ultimately, historic meaning. In a 1996 essay for the New York Review of Books, Joan Didion wrote that “measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent” from Woodward’s post-Watergate books, which are notable mainly for “a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.”

Woodward’s 2000 book on Alan Greenspan, “Maestro,” which was clearly based on extensive access to the Fed chairman, is a good example of what Didion was talking about. As an inside account of what Greenspan said and did and thought, it was a useful primer, and, as with all of Woodward’s books, it included some arresting, if largely irrelevant, narrative details, such as one in which the great man, disturbed by his wife, Andrea Mitchell’s, desire for a canine companion, asks one of his colleagues, the chairman of the Philadelphia Fed, “Well, how do you tell your wife you don’t want a dog?” But as a guide to the impact of Greenspan’s policies, or the real significance of his rise to a godlike status, “Maestro” wasn’t much help at all. Less than a year after it was published, the stock-market bubble that Greenspan had helped to inflate burst, and the country was plunged into a recession.

By then, Woodward was working on the first of four books about the Bush Administration and the Iraq war. Last year, he published his latest tell-all, “The Price of Politics,” which gives a detailed account of the failed efforts in 2011 to reach a Grand Bargain on taxes and spending before the debt ceiling was breached. More critical than some of his earlier books, it essentially says that President Obama bungled negotiations with congressional Republicans, and portrays him as overconfident, underprepared, and confrontational.

That account is a bit hard to square with other accounts of Republican obstreperousness, including a detailed one by The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber, or with my colleague Ryan Lizza’s new piece on Eric Cantor, in which the House Republican virtually admits it was he who torpedoed the debt-ceiling negotiations. Still, there can be no doubt that the summer of 2011 wasn’t Obama’s finest hour. If the White House didn’t like Woodward’s book, nobody disputed the fact that it was based on painstaking reporting. The author had spoken to many of the people who were involved, on both sides, including, it seemed, some of Obama’s own negotiators.

Now comes “Woodward-Gate,” a nasty little spat over whether, in an e-mail sent last week, Gene Sperling, the head of the White House’s National Economic Council, threatened the Washington Post legend. Perhaps the most surprising part of this storm in an eggcup is that, from the perspective of Woodward’s self-interest, it was counterproductive and almost entirely unnecessary. In an op-ed posted online last Friday, Woodward made two points: it was Obama, not the Republicans, who came up with the sequester; and the President, in calling for a balanced package of spending cuts and tax increases to replace it, was “moving the goalposts.”

The first point appears to be accurate. In portraying the sequester as a Republican idea during a Presidential debate last year, President Obama misspoke. Woodward’s reporting makes clear that the idea originated from the White House’s budget negotiators, Jacob Lew (now the Treasury Secretary) and Rob Nabors. Desperate to avoid a failure to extend the debt ceiling, which could have led to a U.S. debt default, they designed the sequester as a “poison pill” that would kick the dispute down the road while providing an incentive for both sides to compromise. This discrepancy, presumably, was what Sperling was referring to in an e-mail to Woodward, which was leaked to Politico. Sperling wrote, “I do understand your problems with a couple of our statements in the fall — but feel on the other hand that you focus on a few specific trees that gives a very wrong perception of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here.”

On the second point, it’s equally obvious that Woodward was the one who erred. The White House was clear all along that, when it came to replacing the sequester, it would demand a balanced package of spending cuts and revenue increases. In signing the legislation that put the sequester in place, Obama said, “This compromise requires that both parties work together on a larger plan to cut the deficit, which is important for the long-term health of our economy. And since you can’t close the deficit with just spending cuts, we’ll need a balanced approach where everything is on the table.”

Woodward’s determination to accuse Obama of shifting ground prompted Sperling to remark that he would regret making such a claim. In a subsequent interview with two reporters from Politico, Woodward portrayed this statement as a threat, remarking, “You know, tremble, tremble. I don’t think it’s the way to operate.” But the full text of Sperling’s e-mail, eventually revealed by Politico, hardly supports such an interpretation. Here is what he wrote:

I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim. The idea that the sequester was to force both sides to go back to try at a big or grand barain with a mix of entitlements and revenues (even if there were serious disagreements on composition) was part of the DNA of the thing from the start. It was an accepted part of the understanding — from the start. Really. It was assumed by the Rs on the Supercommittee that came right after: it was assumed in the November-December 2012 negotiations. There may have been big disagreements over rates and ratios — but that it was supposed to be replaced by entitlements and revenues of some form is not controversial.

As far as I can see, Sperling’s history is largely a matter of record, and he has little to apologize for. He shouldn’t have shouted at Woodward over the phone—he admits that. But for any political reporter, it’s hardly unheard of for an official to loudly protest about something critical you are going to write, or have written. If Woodward hasn’t experienced this sort of thing before, I’d be very surprised.

For whatever reason—anger at the White House’s efforts to spin the sequester dispute; personal animus towards Obama; a genuine misinterpretation of what happened in 2011—Woodward threw an interception. Two, actually. If he’d stuck to pointing out that the sequester was a White House proposal, albeit one that was forced upon it by the G.O.P.’s willingness to force a debt default, he would have been fine; by accusing the President of doing a U-turn on revenues he went too far. And in accusing Sperling of threatening him, he greatly compounded his error and brought the world down upon himself.

That’s regrettable. For all his faults, Woodward is an industrious reporter, who, at the age of sixty-nine, is still out there conducting interviews and taking notes. In any dispute between the White House and a journalist, my first instinct is to support the latter. In trying to discredit stories and books it doesn’t like, and the writers responsible for them, this Administration, like many before it, has showed itself capable of acting ruthlessly and callously. Woodward isn’t just any reporter, though, and on this occasion he opened himself up to ridicule. Going forward, perhaps he should stick to reported articles and books, which presumably get edited and fact-checked, and leave the op-eds and interviews with Politico to the subjects of his stories.

Recommended Stories

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.